What usually strikes people when first meeting Aidan O'Brien is how ordinary he appears. Possibly because he is so startlingly successful, he is expected to cut an almost mythological figure. Certainly not the sort of slight, bespectacled and unassuming broth of a boy that was even temporarily denied access to the Cheltenham festival winners' enclosure last year. Typically, the winner in the enclosure was his.
That winner was Istabraq who tomorrow will be long odds-on to win the Irish Champion Hurdle before going back to Cheltenham to try and win the Championship proper. Istabraq is currently the most obvious evidence of the ordinary looking young man's extraordinary talent for making his racehorses run faster than anyone else's.
In the greater scheme of things, there may be more valuable talents, but in racing's exotic cocktail of glory, despair and greed, there are none more treasured. Since officially taking out a training licence in 1993, O'Brien has trained the winners of 899 races in Ireland and in the process revolutionised the training game.
Be they adolescent two-year-olds, gnarled old steeplechasers, or any shape or type in between, the 28-year-old from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, makes them run. Such is the faith in his ability to derive improvement from his charges that the unfortunate creation currently trotting around Dubai under the handle of Cama would be backed if AP O'Brien appeared next to its name. It mightn't win, but many would be slow to leave it out of the jackpot.
It's that sort of talent that has made O'Brien champion trainer over jumps and on the flat, but it's the latter where his full impact has yet to be made. Considering O'Brien won three of Ireland's five classics last year, that could be regarded as a foolish statement, but with the financial might of Coolmore Stud behind his operation at the famous Ballydoyle stables, it seems justified. The revolution could be far from over.
"Okay, he won three classics last season, but I don't think we have seen anything yet of the dominance that Aidan is going to have over Irish racing, especially on the flat. What he has done in such a short space of time is amazing. I've never seen anything like it. At the same age, Vincent (O'Brien) was just training jumpers," says O'Brien's friend and racecourse commentator, Dessie Scahill.
The upcoming 1998 flat season could see the beginning of that dominance. Twelve of the top 20 rated two-year-olds of last season were trained by O'Brien, including classic hopes such as Second Empire and King Of Kings, but even comparisons with the legendary Vincent O'Brien may not hold up.
"Vincent dominated the Curragh, Leopardstown and the Phoenix Park. Aidan has so many horses and he runs them at Killarney or Ballinrobe or wherever. It could actually be bad for the game. Flat racing is hard enough to sell anyway without one stable being totally on top, but when it comes down to it, that's not Aidan's or Coolmore's concern," Scahill adds.
Such a scenario won't thrill O'Brien's rivals, however. Inevitably there are a substantial number of trainers nursing professional jealousies and resentments, especially with the sheer scale of numbers coming from Ballydoyle and the three yards at Piltown in Co Kilkenny where the vast majority of O'Brien's jumpers are housed.
Whatever their argument, though, there is no question that O'Brien has developed a uniquely extensive and successful training operation, made even more fascinating by how quickly he has developed it. Certainly it was difficult to predict such dynamism when O'Brien left school before doing his Leaving Cert and worked in a variety of jobs, including weeding strawberries and working as a fork-lift driver in Waterford Co-Op. His father kept a number of point-topoint horses which had stirred the young man's interest, however, and after a short period working for Curragh trainer PJ Finn, O'Brien joined Jim Bolger as a stable lad.
O'Brien has described the three-and-a-half years he spent with Bolger as "an invaluable experience - I would start work in the dark and finish in the dark".
Marriage to Anne Marie Crowley took him away from Bolger's yard and in an alliance with his wife and her father, Joe Crowley, the face of jump racing in Ireland was changed. The hill at the Piltown training establishment became famous as a fleet of winners sailed from south Kilkenny.
"That for me is the most amazing thing he has done. He was taking horses that others couldn't win with and improving them by three stone. The hard work was getting the success at Piltown and then Coolmore jumped on the bandwagon with all their bluebloods," says Scahill.
The logic behind stallion master John Magnier's decision to invite O'Brien to train at the legendary Ballydoyle establishment was obvious. If the guy can train bad horses to win, what could he do with good ones? The answers have been coming thick and fast in the last three years.
"Aidan has been very good for us, a remarkable success story," says Coolmore spokesman Paul Shanahan. "Nothing is a problem to him and that makes life easy for everyone. I honestly believe he is fantastic for Irish racing. There has been a sudden resurgence, especially in our impact internationally, and there are very exciting times ahead."
All of which begs the obvious question, how does O'Brien do it? Typically self-effacing, O'Brien usually passes such questions off by praising his team of workers, but they hardly just materialised. The Trainers' Association chairman, Willie Mullins, comments: "What I admire most about Aidan is the system he has got going. He has a very young staff who obviously work hard and well for him."
Scahill points out that having good staff around illustrates the same sort of managerial skill as a successful football manager, but O'Brien's talent is much more than that.
"He has a huge in-depth knowledge, an unusual understanding of horses, plus he has a great brain. I've sat in the jeep with him in Ballydoyle, passed a string of 35 horses and bang, bang, bang - he'll give you the name and pedigree of each horse, where it will run next and what its overall aim is," Scahill says, before adding that O'Brien works extraordinarily hard indeed.
"He is very hands-on. In fact, he hates going racing. He thinks it's a waste of time. The hard work is done before race day and he only goes when he has to. Other trainers are always carrying saddles around at the races or talking to the press. Aidan avoids the press like the plague. He knows it's all part and parcel of the game, but if he's eight or nine hours away from the yard, he's fuming. His view is he could be doing something much more important at home." From that it's possible to draw a pretty one-dimensional character, whose nose is permanently to the grindstone. Friends point out that when relaxed, O'Brien, a nonsmoker and a non-drinker, can be good company, but his job is an all-encompassing obsession. "I don't think he believes there's an outside world," says Scahill. "If he went to a concert or a football match, he'd be apt to leave within 20 minutes. As for a holiday, I don't think he knows the meaning of the word."
Such is O'Brien's workload, which involves daily sorties between Ballydoyle and Piltown, that questions have been asked as to how long he can keep going at a pace normally associated with one of his champions. He himself has said that he sees no conflict between his flat and jumping yards, but with the pressures of training hugely expensive classic aspirants, a concentration on the more lucrative summer sport is being forecasted. Significantly, his brotherin-law, ex-jockey Trevor Horgan, is testing the training waters by taking out a permit.
"I think Aidan would always love to have some top jumpers," says Paul Shanahan. "John (Magnier) would, too. Ballydoyle isn't really geared for them, though, but I could see Aidan keeping 10 or 12 high-quality National Hunt horses."
Such an eventuality will console some of his rivals who, feeling hopelessly out-gunned in recent years, have looked resentfully at the four yards under the O'Brien banner and fear a regime along American lines where a trainer can oversee multiple yards in different areas and send out torrents of winners. Willie Mullins acknowledges that some trainers do get frustrated with the seemingly omnipresent O'Brien animals dominating races, but asks: "Is it the way racing is going? In the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were a lot of smaller trainers, but now the numbers of horses seem to be concentrated in a few yards."
If that is the way racing is now, O'Brien is only making the most of it. The best are always in demand and, at just 28, the Master of Ballydoyle is acknowledged as just that. The intriguing thought for those who admire his talent is how far ahead of his competitors he will eventually get? In time, Istabraq may be as much of a dot on his trainer's CV as he is likely to be in the distance of his rivals tomorrow.
